The Clutch of Circumstance
by Oracle Glass
Summary: Natasha makes an end, and finds a beginning. Can be read as gen or pre-relationship.


She is a girl with many mothers and fathers. They are cold, they burn, they are towering gods she must please or else there is darkness and pain. Her lessons must be learned quickly, to perfection. She must not ever fail to please. She has sisters, but they are pale shadows compared to the intense reality of the fathers and mothers. Sometimes, a sister disappears and is replaced by another, equally vague. She never learns their names.

She grows up, is sent out into the world. It is almost as indistinct as her shadowy sisters - greys that sometimes blossom into crimson. She is very good. They are pleased with her. She moves upon the face of the earth, and leaves death in her wake.

One day she does It. It's so bad, the world stutters for a moment, turns from grey into the color of flames. Like the removal of a blindfold, cotton-wool from the ears, the world comes roaring in, containing horror beyond words. She has done something terrible, and she knows it.

She runs. She hides. She knows that somewhere, the fathers must be enraged, the mothers venomous at her disobedience. But she has come to some sort of knowledge about herself. She is poisonous. She should be crushed under someone's heel.

When she realizes the archer is hunting her, the relief is so profound it makes her gasp. Old habits keep her running, but she can tell, he's good enough to find her unless luck is on her side, and she prays for bad luck. On she runs, hoping the end comes quickly. Where will the bolt take her? In the heart, over and done with within the span of seconds? In the stomach, a slow, ugly death? In the throat, to choke her on her own blood? She accepts the variable fates as what she is due. Bad, bad, bad Natasha.

It's all so anticlimactic in the end.

He catches her in Athens. It's the bedroom of a dingy hostel, a room for six but she has paid the fee for the rest of the beds, so she can curl alone on the bottom bunk of the third bunkbed to the left, shaking from too much exertion and too little food. The window is barred with corroded iron, but something hisses and flares and the bars clank and fall three stories to the ground. The room fills with thick ropes of gas. She smiles as it takes her, certain she'll never wake up again. This is certainly kinder than it might have been.

When she wakes up, it's such a _surprise_. A hazy sunrise is sending fragile light through the ugly little room, and she can see the silhouette of the archer, sitting on the bed next to her. One of her hands is cuffed to the bed's iron skeleton, leaving her a limited range of motion. Naturally, all her weapons have been taken away, even the small blade that most people don't find.

The archer's face is difficult to read in the dimness. He helps her sit up, and offers her a sealed bottle of water. She opens it awkwardly and sips, too thirsty to argue. When her stomach growls, he grins at her and fumbles in a pack for two granola bars, which he courteously opens for her.

"Hi," he says. "I'm Clint. You're Natasha, I believe? If our information is correct, that is."

It's all too confusing, so she ducks her head, doesn't answer, eats the food silently. She didn't think the archer's organization was quite so cat-and-mouse, but perhaps they mean to keep her whole and later try their hand at torture. Never mind. There will be a way to kill herself at some point. There usually is. Her preliminary thoughts about how she might seize the knife from his hip and saw open her throat are interrupted by his voice.

"So," he says casually. "Where do you want this to go?"

She tips her head sideways and studies him, still chewing. The granola sticks in her dry throat, so she swigs from the water bottle again. Her silence doesn't seem to deter him.

"I'm pretty sure you expect me to kill you right now. And to be honest, that was the original plan. I have some other thoughts on the subject, though."

She scowls at him, abruptly in a cold fury. How dare he rewrite her script?

"I expect you," she says coldly, despite the rasp in her throat, "to punish me. For the fire. For the," her voice stutters on the word, "_children_. Justice, yes? You are here to put an end to me."

He scratches his chin. "Yeah. I mean, that's why I'm here, you're not wrong about that. It was a tipping point, you might say, although they've kept their eyes on you a lot recently. But I don't think it has to go like that."

"Of course it does," she snarls. "You saw what I did. You know who I am."

"Well, yeah. Sniper, clever bird-of-prey nickname, that whole thing." He shrugs. "I see pretty good. Chased you for a while. Had a lot of time to get to know you, even if it was at a distance. They sent me to kill a stone-cold assassin. But, you know, I saw you. Afterwards."

His voice is mildly apologetic, regretful about the breach of manners. She bows her head, letting a wing of hair hide her face from him as she tries to reason out where the trap lies, but he just keeps talking.

"I didn't see somebody getting off on the killing. Those are the dangerous types, gotta put them down before it gets out of hand and they start picking targets at random just to keep the thrill alive. That's not you. I don't know if it ever was. It looked like you maybe were coming to a new decision about things. And I figure, maybe you need to get the chance to try out that new decision."

She moans softly. "I'm not some...some redemption case. Do you have some sort of savior complex? Why are you doing this?"

He shrugs, stuffs a pillow into a ball, and lies back. His next few words are addressed to the bottom of the bunk above them.

"I don't think I have a savior complex. Sounds like a lot of work. But people deserve a chance to start over, if that's what they want. Done it myself, once or twice. Probably harder for you. Doesn't mean it's not worth trying." His voice fades. "Been up for a couple of days...just going to catch a quick nod..."

And just like that, he's asleep.

Natasha stares at him for several long minutes. He looks ridiculously young, and he's snoring faintly. He's not even in tactical armor, but instead in jeans, a t-shirt, sneakers, with only the knife at his waist and the archer's glove separating him from every boozy American tourist heading to the islands to find a party boat stocked with beer and women. He's not at all like the swift hand of righteous justice she's been anticipating. She waits ten minutes, counted out precisely, then leans forward, sliding her hand to his hip. Perhaps she can liberate that knife of his.

He swats at her hand, grunts, "Nuh-uh," without opening his eyes, and rolls on his side, trapping the knife under his body. A second later, he's snoring again. She leans back against the wall and starts to evaluate her options. None of them include taking him up on his offer. She doesn't believe in it.

When he wakes up exactly an hour later, she's made no progress freeing her wrist from the ridiculously over-engineered handcuffs he's trapped her in. He grins at her as she spits out a frustrated curse.

"SHIELD guaranteed me those would hold you. And speaking of..."

He sits up, taps an earpiece and says, "Hey, Coulson. Put Fury on the line, will you? I have a proposition for him. Yeah, yeah. I know. I know. I know, all right? Put him on anyway."

He waits. She waits. Sirens scream by outside. The sun is up higher in the sky, and the room is starting to get too warm. Sweat is beading up at his hairline.

"Hi, Director. I have her. No, yeah, I got that. I want to make a different call. Yeah, I know. Well to be honest, I haven't exactly asked her. Hang on a sec."

He looks over at her. "So, uh...want to give this a try? See how the other half lives?"

She shakes her head. "I don't understand you. I don't understand what you're doing."

"She says yes."

"I did not!" she yells.

"Uh, no, sir. Must have been interference. We're good. We'll be at the extraction point in a half-hour. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, I guess if it doesn't work, you can fire me. There's always a circus looking for a new act and I've been working on that thing with the watermelon..." There's a buzz of static and he grins. "He hung up on me." He taps his earpiece again, takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, and then stands up. "So. Shall we go? I really need a shower."

"You...you..." her rage keeps her from finding adequate epithets to hurl at him.

"Listen, Tasha," and she hisses at the nickname. He takes a prudent step backwards. "No, really. Listen. If you really want it, I'll leave you a gun. One bullet. I'll walk out of here and let you do it."

He touches her forearm lightly with calloused fingertips, and she jerks under his hand.

"I don't want to kill you, and I'd rather not help you blow your brains out all over this sad little room. I don't like killing people, generally speaking. Gives me bad dreams. If you really want to die, you're going to have to do it yourself. But I think you shouldn't be too quick to say no to...to...I don't know, pick a cliche. Turn over a new leaf? Make a new start? Make amends? I know a little bit about deeply shitty pasts and regret, although I bet my shit couldn't stand up to whatever they put you through. But I do know that you can choose something different."

She stares at his face. There are lines there - he looks exhausted for the first time, like things have finally caught up with him, too. But whatever he's telling her, he believes. Her chest hurts. It's too hard, what he's asking.

"I...I don't know if I can," she whispers. "I don't know if I want to. I don't know if I _can_ want to."

"I'd bet on you." He shrugs casually, but his eyes are serious. "We're not so terrible, you know. Imperfect, but not so bad."

She's trembling. It's been too much, the chase and the shattering of all her resolutions. All the...surprises. Her resolve to die, which had been so strong in her, has ebbed away, leaving behind an empty feeling that she's not used to. Before, her training had filled her up entirely. Now she's been hollowed out. The possibility of something new to fill her up seems impossible. She'd have to be crazy, to trust these people. To trust this ordinary-looking man who can kill her now, if he chooses. To trust whatever agency sent him.

But. She is drenched in red. Perhaps...a very little perhaps, but there it is...she might rinse herself clean, eventually.

She can't say it, so she just nods, one sharp jerk of her chin downwards. But he gets it, grins at her and unlocks her cuffs, helping her stand when she wobbles. They make their way down the worn stone stairs and out into the stream of people pushing past each other in the narrow streets. The retrieval point is a short walk away, behind the store of a man selling honey and small greasy paper bags of fried dough. Clint snags a couple of the bags as they pass through the store and hands one to Natasha.

It's the first hot food she's had in thirty-six hours, so she eats them slowly, sucking the grease off her fingertips as Clint pokes his head out into the back alley to make sure they've arrived unobserved. They have a little time to wait, so they sit, side by side in wooden chairs that flake flurries of paint chips with every movement.

The lull makes Natasha edgy again, lets the grey start to creep back in. She shakes. Despite the heat, she feels ice solidify around her. They will be so angry with her. So angry. She has turned her back on everyone.

She stands. The chair crashes off to one side. The knife, she can still get the knife. She turns to face Clint, who stood up when she did.

His hand closes over her wrist. The pressure makes the grey recede, just a bit. His face is the only clear thing in the room. "It's ok," he says. "It's ok, Tasha. You're going to be ok."

She shakes her head. "No, no, no. How can I be?"

"Because," he says, his hands warm against her chilled skin. "You're stronger than they are."

They stand together, only their hands touching. Minutes pass. Gradually, her trembling passes. From some deep recess she did not know she possessed, she finds strength she did not know she had. The grey clears away. She takes a deep breath, lets it out again.

"Clint?"

"Yeah?"

"Call me Tasha again, and I'll have your balls to play billiards with."

He laughs, genuine, deep-throated.

A car pulls up into the back alley. The rest of her life begins.


End file.
